Disclaimer: I marked my review as having spoilers, despite the fact that the plot is as predicable as the phases of the moon, because I "revealed" plot details even though you will undoubtedly know them the instant the story begins.
I caught the original "Walking with Dinosaurs" documentary when it first aired in 2000. It was a truly groundbreaking experience, combing state-of-the-art CGI with nature documentary-style storytelling in a television program. It has held up over the years quite well, and was followed by equally-good sequels including "Prehistoric Beasts" and "Monsters".
Fast forward 13 years later, and we now have a motion picture based on the name. A brand new "Walking with Dinosaurs", set on following the life of a Pachyrhinosaurus as he braves the Prehistoric Alaskan wilderness, encountering other dinosaurs such as the predatory Gorgosaurus and the giant, but gentle, Edmontonia, all told with beautiful cinematography and top-notch CGI.
That sounds great, right? Well, what happened BBC? What the hell happened? I feel like I've been treated like an idiot. Walking With Dinosaurs: The Movie has zero charm, annoying and atrocious voice overs, a bare bones plot straight out of The Land Before Time, except without the emotion or drama, and a completely pointless frame story about a kid, his sister, and his uncle (as modern day humans, annoyingly) digging for fossils.
It seems the filmmakers were originally intending on making this film a docudrama in the style of the original, and this would have been great. We would have really been invested in the individual dinosaurs as we followed them through their lives, and it would have been really immersive and engaging.
But nope. Someone somewhere down the line decided that we needed half-assed, and rushed, voice overs to be able to know what the dinosaurs are thinking/doing, because apparently the studio executives think that audiences cannot understand body language, or the fact that film is a visual medium first and foremost. But given all the flak aimed at films like Avatar and Pacific Rim, they might be justified in that assumption. But the fact is is that we are smarter than that, and there was no reason to add these voice overs other than the pander to the lowest common denominator.
And the fact that the voice overs sound like they were added late in production only serves to drive the point home. It sounds like the voice actors were not reading off of script, but rather watching the film and trying to do their dialogue in real time, like a bunch of 12-year old youtube commentators trying to be funny by adding voices to silent characters or animals. Then there is the fact that their is no lip-synching whatsoever. None.
The story is a shadow of the plot used in Land Before Time. Main character hatches from egg and is raised by parent, his dad dies protecting him from a predator in the midst of a natural disaster (a wildfire this time around), he grows up, deals with hardships, falls in love, and comes back to beat those pesky predators, while winning the girl of his dreams. That is all there is to the plot. You cannot get any more by-the-numbers than that in this day and age.
The humor is awful, because the 10-year old that wrote this script must have had some fascination with butt jokes and derivatives. Our main character has a hole in his head where the hole in the skull is, on the right side (left side in the promotional materials, for some reason). Gaze in amazement as every joke about his "nice hole" comes out as sounding like forced innuendo in a script that makes Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen look like a Christopher Nolan masterpiece.
The music is a mixed bag. On one hand, the music used for the first Pachy migration sequence and the Edmontosaurus migration were pretty decent and fitting, and then there pop songs. In a dinosaur film. Why.
Enough ranting already. The visuals are nothing short of spectacular, featuring gorgeous photography of the Alaskan geography as brilliantly-rendered dinosaurs and pterosaurs frolic amongst the landscape, with attention to detail paid in footprints and the animation.
Unfortunately, anything the film gets right is immediately drown out by the ear-grating voice overs and juvenile script that serves only to pander to the youngest portion of the viewer base. Walking With Dinosaurs may be a treat for the youngsters, but older viewers who actually posses a legitimate interest in paleontology will be turned off and left confused and enraged.
I caught the original "Walking with Dinosaurs" documentary when it first aired in 2000. It was a truly groundbreaking experience, combing state-of-the-art CGI with nature documentary-style storytelling in a television program. It has held up over the years quite well, and was followed by equally-good sequels including "Prehistoric Beasts" and "Monsters".
Fast forward 13 years later, and we now have a motion picture based on the name. A brand new "Walking with Dinosaurs", set on following the life of a Pachyrhinosaurus as he braves the Prehistoric Alaskan wilderness, encountering other dinosaurs such as the predatory Gorgosaurus and the giant, but gentle, Edmontonia, all told with beautiful cinematography and top-notch CGI.
That sounds great, right? Well, what happened BBC? What the hell happened? I feel like I've been treated like an idiot. Walking With Dinosaurs: The Movie has zero charm, annoying and atrocious voice overs, a bare bones plot straight out of The Land Before Time, except without the emotion or drama, and a completely pointless frame story about a kid, his sister, and his uncle (as modern day humans, annoyingly) digging for fossils.
It seems the filmmakers were originally intending on making this film a docudrama in the style of the original, and this would have been great. We would have really been invested in the individual dinosaurs as we followed them through their lives, and it would have been really immersive and engaging.
But nope. Someone somewhere down the line decided that we needed half-assed, and rushed, voice overs to be able to know what the dinosaurs are thinking/doing, because apparently the studio executives think that audiences cannot understand body language, or the fact that film is a visual medium first and foremost. But given all the flak aimed at films like Avatar and Pacific Rim, they might be justified in that assumption. But the fact is is that we are smarter than that, and there was no reason to add these voice overs other than the pander to the lowest common denominator.
And the fact that the voice overs sound like they were added late in production only serves to drive the point home. It sounds like the voice actors were not reading off of script, but rather watching the film and trying to do their dialogue in real time, like a bunch of 12-year old youtube commentators trying to be funny by adding voices to silent characters or animals. Then there is the fact that their is no lip-synching whatsoever. None.
The story is a shadow of the plot used in Land Before Time. Main character hatches from egg and is raised by parent, his dad dies protecting him from a predator in the midst of a natural disaster (a wildfire this time around), he grows up, deals with hardships, falls in love, and comes back to beat those pesky predators, while winning the girl of his dreams. That is all there is to the plot. You cannot get any more by-the-numbers than that in this day and age.
The humor is awful, because the 10-year old that wrote this script must have had some fascination with butt jokes and derivatives. Our main character has a hole in his head where the hole in the skull is, on the right side (left side in the promotional materials, for some reason). Gaze in amazement as every joke about his "nice hole" comes out as sounding like forced innuendo in a script that makes Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen look like a Christopher Nolan masterpiece.
The music is a mixed bag. On one hand, the music used for the first Pachy migration sequence and the Edmontosaurus migration were pretty decent and fitting, and then there pop songs. In a dinosaur film. Why.
Enough ranting already. The visuals are nothing short of spectacular, featuring gorgeous photography of the Alaskan geography as brilliantly-rendered dinosaurs and pterosaurs frolic amongst the landscape, with attention to detail paid in footprints and the animation.
Unfortunately, anything the film gets right is immediately drown out by the ear-grating voice overs and juvenile script that serves only to pander to the youngest portion of the viewer base. Walking With Dinosaurs may be a treat for the youngsters, but older viewers who actually posses a legitimate interest in paleontology will be turned off and left confused and enraged.